Nina Ognianova is coordinator of CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program. A native of Bulgaria, Ognianova has led CPJ advocacy missions to Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.

2010

Kazakhstan is ready to bring its press laws in line with
international standards, a top diplomat told a CPJ delegation in Vienna this
week. Decriminalizing libel, placing caps on defamation awards, and enacting access-to-information
legislation are on the government's agenda, said Kazakhstan Ambassador Kairat
Abdrakhmanov, who is chairman of the permanent council of the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe.

On June 3, I took a six-hour-long drive from Almaty to Taraz with local press freedom advocate Rozlana Taukina and two family members of imprisoned editor Ramazan Yesergepov to visit him. Yesergepov has been a long-term case for CPJ. In November 2008, he published two internal Kazakh security service (KNB) memos in his now-defunct newspaper, Alma-Ata Info, which attested to the KNB’s attempts to influence a prosecutor and a judge in a criminal tax evasion case.

Tags:

Belarus
has been termed Europe’s last dictatorship
because of its long intolerance of dissent and press freedom. So accustomed is
the world to the clampdowns of President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime that
neither a recently issued decree on Internet access, which requires that providers
record users’ personal data, nor last week’s police
raids at a number of independent news offices, came as much of a surprise
to anyone. “Belarus—reliably
repressive” would be the country’s bumper sticker were press freedom groups to make
one.